It's August 20th: our RSS feeds have slowed to a crawl and everyone else is at the beach. But the political-media outrage machine carries on. ABC's Jake Tapper, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan, Touré and Malcom X all need a vacation.

Yesterday, on a conference call with rabbis about healthcare, Obama declared that "we are God's partners in matters of life and death," which is evidence that his messianic tendencies have merged with his hatred of the elderly into a potent tonic of cartoonish villainy. He was inspired by a Rosh Hashanah prayer—"On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed / And on Yom Kippur it is sealed / How many shall pass away and how many shall be born / Who shall live and who shall die"—and signed off the call with a hearty "L'shanah tovah," Hebrew for happy holidays (even though Rosh Hashanah's a ways off, but still). Politico's Ben Smith smelled Drudgebait, so he wrote it up without really drawing attention to how insane people would surely interpret the comments. Drudge smelled traffic from insane people, so he linked to it while only subtly drawing attention to how insane people would interpret the comments. Insane people saw the story on Drudge, and went insane: "You know who used to talk like this? Jim Jones and David Koresh." (Interestingly, Smith's source for the Obama quote was a rabbi who was in on the call and "live-Tweeted" it. That rabbi has since deleted all the posts—including the one about being "God's partner"—and apologized for publicizing it.)

ABC News' Tapper wrote a blog post yesterday in which he quoted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's spokesman saying, of the healthcare bill, "we are determined to get something done this year by any legislative means necessary." Malcolm X once strung together the words "by any means necessary," so Journalist Jake decided to add a video of Malcolm X to his post just to underscore the point that Barack Obama is a radical Muslim black separatist. We kid! While we've been perfectly happy to mock Tapper in the past for offenses big and small, we think this (crazy) conflation of Malcolm X and the legislative process is motivated more by a misguided attempt on Tapper's part to be cheeky rather than to remind terrified old people that Obama hates "working white people," or to get Drudge's attention. Poor Tapper has been furiously defending himself on Twitter, reminding folks that "President Obama not even mentioned," and the DailyKos says, "Seriously, WTF Jake?"